Russia’s space station crew devotes record time to science

Cosmonauts who completed their mission to the International Space Station (ISS) in mid-March devoted a record 33 percent of their work time to conducting scientific experiments, a space official said on Thursday.

Valery Korzun, a deputy department head at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, said that while in orbit, Oleg Novitsky and Yevgeny Tarelkin spent 210 and 225 working hours on conducting scientific experiments, respectively. “This accounts for 33 percent of their working time,” Korzun said at a ceremony to greet the crew in Zvyozdny Gorodok (Star City) in the Moscow Region.

“In accordance with the Russian program of long-term scientific research and experiments, the crew of the Russian segment of the ISS conducted 40 experiments out of the 47 carried out at the station during this period,” he said. Novitsky and Tarelkin, along with NASA astronaut Kevin Ford, arrived at the ISS in October 2012 and returned to Earth on March 16 after 142 days in orbit.